Hero or Zero smartphone? - Staying ahead of the need for RAM

Sadly, the reason I am progressively less and less likely to buy Nokia next is clearly represented by the way their devices are grape-shot either side of the line, and the yet-to-be-launched N8 is only just comfortably above it.

My likelihood of getting an N97 mini has gone from certain to slim, even before seeing that.

Nokia seem to practice "just enough" hardware design, and frequently get it wrong. They do some things great, like cameras and speakers, but rarely all together, and never all the time. Case in point: Speakers and screen on the N97 mini were a step backwards.

With full acknowledgement that they sell to more markets, at more price points, than just about anyone else - few of their "flagships" have deserved the label.

A flagship is an opportunity to give the engineers free reign. Just imagine if Nokia had done the software for the i8910.

I'm overjoyed with how cheap the N8 is going to be at launch, but I'm rather less happy with some of the design decisions which got them there.

Dubito
twitter.com/jonathanhepburn
sumdubito.blogspot.com

Interesting article, and one that is close to my heart. As an N86 owner, I'm generally happy with the RAM available to me, but only because I keep an eye on it. If I wanted ALL my calendar and email entries from the last two years on Nokia Messaging, my RAM would take a bit hit, so I set it to be only the last couple of weeks - not ideal if I am looking back for a past event.
On the whole I am happy with the device and the RAM within, but as ever, more would be nice (or what would be NICER still would be the ability to have all the calendar and email entries stored on the 8gb of memory space built into the device!!!- Is that so much to ask for for??!! :con?)

Hi steve,

I'm a frequent visitor of AAS and other symbian web site, and have been yelling about this a lot. And I think you brought the issue very well. Nokia need to revolutionist their SDRAM & the Flashram(Hard drive?) NOW. IN A BIG WAY!!! :)

There is also another issue that nokia have been lacking compared to competitor. I see in the fruit company product (the one that have 1 product to rule them all). It can use most language. But nokia still playing the protected market.

i.e. If I bought the iFruit2 or iFruit3 in the US, I could write korean, japanese, chinese, thai, rusian, arabic, etc.... and nokia failed a big one on this....

not only i can't write the above character, but also not able to read the character. it is so funny to have E series phone that only be able to read local language.

You were not alone.
I've been writing a lot in the last nokia conversation when they bring up the 10 things about nokia E series. I own the RAM unhappy Nokia E61i, and I'm hitting the ram barrier every now and then.

I told nokia that their team is not abusing the device enough, or is not seriously developing a great 'E' devices, or must be fired and replaced. :)

It is a shame that if I put the e-mail/SMS on the microSD, I lost the ability to take out the microSD, and if I put the e-mail/SMS on the phone memory, my phone will be unhappy.

Shame on nokia.!!!!

I can't? You just forgot to install the language packs. Noob.

My N900 has 1GB of RAM (admittedly 256MB RAM + 768MB swap), but it still trashes the hell out of any smartphone in the market today.

I'm kind of symbian veteran. have been using symbian since 3650. But don't know about the language pack at all. Maybe you can be more specific on how to install the language pack.

That right there is a reason Symbian is losing market share to iPhone and Android which, let's face it, is chasing iPhone not Symbian.

Symbian may be a great power-user platform if you know how to work it, but the majority of sales go to "noobs", not power-users.

S60 is a constricting user-experience for first-time users. That's one big reason it's being trashed in the non-specialist press.

I'm somewhat dismayed by several of the previous comments have completely ignored the difference between RAM and storage memory - that I went to GREAT lengths to clarify 8-(

Please guys, read the whole piece. This is NOTHING to do with free disk space.

It still doesn't answer on how to install the new language (pack). As far as i know, there is only one way to install new language, that's by changing the product ID. and it's not qualified as "installing the language pack". because what it does, doesn't add new language, but change the language on the phone.

Hi steve,

I'm aware of the RAM is !NOT! the free disk space. I know when browsing lots of web site, my nokia web browser will die, and therefore i use opera at 95% of time.

but there were more than RAM that nokia failed at. the free disk space is also lame, and also CPU power is also lame.... why the new touch enable phone such as N97 have a slower CPU than E72? even the new C6 will have slower CPU than E5? Not to mention the language (pack?).

I think nokia designer were sabotage-ing nokia at the inside.

Please note, I use nokia, i love nokia. and i wish nokia put better CPU, better RAM & better disk space on their product.

Nokia yet again lagging behind, not one single Symbian has more than 128mb of RAM and you won't see any for at least another 2 months and by then the competition at the high end has already moved onto 512mb of RAM.

Also the N900 has 256mb of RAM. Swap does not equal RAM, it resides on the flash memory.

Well, maybe you can't.

For a longer answer, Google and you may find a solution which breaks your warranty and needs a bit of work. Maybe the N900 has a different, more flexible system - it is, after all, not Symbian.

I'm quite surprised that you chose to model RAM requirements over time in a linear fashion. Moore's law and all that suggests exponential growth.

Only over the long term. I was looking at a range of phones running essentially the same platform (e.g. S60 3rd Edition) over a fairly short time period 8-)

Steve, another great, informative article, especially for some one non-technical like me!

However, I think it could have been even better. I would hope you could explain and perhaps even help undestand a few more things, in addition to a basically factual/statistical presentation of what some phones have and others don't.

So:

1) you say that its a good idea to use resources close to their limit; explain why? I guess you mean price, power consumption etc. but did you have something else in mind too?

2) speaking of price - how much would doubling RAM cost? Has its price gone down the same way other components likely have? And before someone says "$X is nothing" - no its not nothing - margins matter and arguably Nokia's success so far has been largely about shaving costs and preserving margin. obviously, that can be taken too far and may well have been with N97/S60v5.

3) speaking of power consumption - I've seen comments that RAM consumes power - how much truth is there to that?

4) you mention in passing that there may have been some OS/architecture limitations to adding more RAM. I had no idea! Can you explain what those are/were? (Yes, I did see Sammy and SE were able to solve it but still would be intersted to hear what the challenges were).

5) User cases - you mention that for many users even current N97 RAM is sufficient (obviously also for the most vocal users it was not). This is a more generic request for the AAS crew as a whole - could you write a piece on what you know from user case studies? For example, I saw Rafe make a comment that he is continuously surprised how low on that list calendar functionality is. What else suprises you? How many people actually browse on the phone as we do? etc. Might make interesting and illuminating reading, and help understand why Nokia or any other vendor may choose to include or omit a feature or allocate resources for development of a particular feature.

Interesting article as ever, and sadly as an N97 user I'm fully aware of the need for both a bigger C memory and much much more RAM :( Really hope Nokia start 'over engineering' there handsets so they can at least compete with the opposition and the phones will work as advertised !

I'll try not to be too cynical here.. on one hand Steve, you write this article about how important the RAM size is to a phone.. in comparison to your previous article about the smart phone comparisons when the N8 "wins out" despite it having HALF as much RAM as its competitors (iphone and HTC). So which way is it? Oh.. Dont use the "Android and iOS takes more RAM" - simply by the fact that they already win out in doubling the RAM size as it is.

Whilst Symbian does a good job at memory management, we cannot also forget that its notorious for memory leaks. A freshly booted N97 might have 50MB to start, but give it two days of heavy use (closing and opening applications), this maximum will drop down to the mid-30's. It wont be long before requiring a reboot when the Internet browser complains of "Out of memory" errors. The reason? Every time an app closes, it does not close fully leaving some details in memory. This accumulates over time (happens especially with the Mail application) leaving less RAM to play with. My Vivaz falls into the same boat with 150MB to boot, and lowering to 117MB over a few days.

Symbian really lacks the Virtual memory. If they can do this, then it will make things a lot better (but still does not justify for underpowering your device).

Well, it really does depend on how it performs in the real world. Just counting numbers is no guide.

And nobody can realistically judge N8 memory use based on N97 memory leaks.

N8, rather the Symbian^3 OS, brings the feature of "writable demand paging", which has been clearly mentioned in this article. So despite having a lesser amount of RAM, using it will make it seem as if there is actually a lot more. The reason is that only the most active applications remain in RAM, while the rest are written to disk space. AFAIK, no competitor (incl. WebOS, Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, WP7, Bada) offers the feature so far...

Can somebody please explain in noob friendly words how to add an extra language to my X6?

read this:
http://www.techhail.com/mobiles/noki...-firmware/3193

Well this idea is very promising for Lower ram devices as its a standard feature of symbian 3, i wonder is it possible to backport this feature to RAM Crawling devices like N97 and symbian 1 devices

bchliu, well the category you refer to N8 was "multi-tasking, processor and speedt". So not just RAM. Yes, I think Steve should have split that category to three at least (multi-tasking on its own, speed on its own, and processor spec on its own)/

N8 has over 150 Mb of RAM left in most proto devices.... It should be higher.

Why? Have you had a problem where you have run out of RAM with it?